AMD Has No Plans to Intro Brand-Names for "Ontario" and "Zacate" Hybrid Chips.

Advanced Micro Devices does not plan to give a special brand-name to its code-named Ontario and Zacate accelerated processing units (APUs) with x86 and graphics engines in the same chip, but will instead market the new chips under already established "Vision" technology brand. The decision seems be a yet another response to the trend of the so-called platformization in the PC industry.

"Ontario and Zacate will come to market under the 'AMD Vision Technology' brand," said Godfrey Cheng, the director of client technology unit at AMD, in an interview with X-bit labs.

For many years AMD as well as its larger rival Intel sold their central processing units (CPUs) under certain brand-names so to show differences between them within their own lineups and associate all the pleasant consumer experience with those brands, such as Athlon or Pentium. But in the recent years the situation on the markets changed drastically: people ceased to associate microprocessor brands with experiences since their visual experience depended on performance of graphics adapters and quality of computer screens.

In order to show benefits of its set of technologies, AMD introduced Vision brand in 2009 that divided systems powered by AMD's chips into several classes, based on performance of ingredients. For example, Vision Premium-labeled notebooks represent the best-of-the-best that AMD-based mobile systems can offer.

Inside AMD Vision-branded machines there are Athlon-, Phenom-, Sempron- or Turion-branded microprocessors. But inside next-generation systems powered by the Brazos platform with the first-generation Ontario and Zacate inside, accelerated processing units themselves will not have a name; instead, they will carry one of AMD's Vision platforms logotypes that will determine their performance and feature levels.

AMD Brazos platform for desktops and mobile computers will consist of AMD Fusion accelerated processing unit (APU) code-named Ontario/Zacate (featuring one or two x86 cores based on Bobcat micro-architecture as well as a DirectX 11 and OpenCL-compliant graphics engine) in addition to code-named Hudson D1 fusion controller hub, which will connect to processor using PCI Express 2.0 x4 bus and will support 4 PCIe x1 ports, PCI bus, 6 Serial ATA-300 ports, 14 USB 2.0 ports as well as integrated clock-generator. The part does not support RAID, Gigabit Ethernet and other capabilities.

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ATI is a well-established brand known for performance. Ontario and Zacate cannot even compete against Pentium Dual-Core. The CPU brand that cannot compete against lower-end of the competing offerings will instantly be considered negatively. So what is the point of introducing a name here? AMD is specifically _not_ competing against Atom.

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Despite this, I think that each APU will have its own model number, like C-350. The Vision brand has been used by AMD for some time, with questionnable benefits. Launching an all-new technology (Fusion of GPU+CPU) under the Vision brand name is confusing.

If "The Future Is Fusion" but there is no Fusion brand, AMD will have to change its slogan to "The Future Was Fusion".

In other news...Are there going to be brand names for Llano and Bulldozer?